Twist with destiny: No more Indirah-rah, and the original Gandhi isn’t faring too well either

This Independence Day we will hear the thundering speech of another orator who, in full measure, has kept his tryst with destiny made long years ago while ferrying cups of chai on Vadodara station and battling lake crocodiles. Earlier in the week, came reports that the first casualties of the recent ‘freedom movement’ led by him are the very man who had given us the ‘t with d’ cliche and his daughter. Bridging the urban-rural divide, Nehru’s name is rumoured to be dropped from the JNNURM and the Indira Awas Yojana will be rechristened the National Gramin Awas Mission. Can ports and airports be far behind? No problem: the boorey din befalling the dynasty has much to do with its own follies. But the courtiers of the new king on the block may have little time left for either governance or government if they are assigned the Herculean task of weeding out the names of the Nehru-Gandhis from a myriad institutions.

At last count there were 450 projects, universities, buildings etc immortalising the dynasty but the number would be much higher if one were to include statues, roads and chhota-mota recurrences. So, a whole new yojana could be instituted to identify them, expunge them, rename them and replace the documents, stationery and all the other paraphernalia that becomes necessary in our obsession with nomenclutter. In fact, it could become a new employment guarantee scheme, and be named after one of the many BJP icons now being exhumed. This honour will last only as long as this party rule for, in the political canon, immortality is time-barred.

Musical names is a hoary political game, but will all the aam janata called Jawahar, Indira, Rajiv, Rahul, Priyanka or Sonia rush to announce that, vide gazette notification 1234/56, they will henceforth be known as Sushma, Smriti, Nirmala, Meenakshi, Deen Dayal, Atal, Arun, Amit and of course Narendra? It’s improbable but not unknown. In what wasn’t yet Communist Calcutta, a Ballygunge babu changed his name from Lenin to Stalin in 1924, when the former died and the latter became party chief.

Indira Gandhi and her expunger, Narendra Modi, are linked to the two vilest communal riots of recent times, though very differently. Our omnipotent PM’s surname is spelt in the common way unlike the famous Parsi Modys who had adopted the ‘y’, perhaps to set them apart from ‘Hindoo banias’. The irrepressible Swatantra Party MP, Piloo Mody, however, said he used this spelling because he was allergic to the letter ‘I’ — he had dramatically opposed Indira’s policies, and she had jailed him during Emergency. The allergy has spread. Now, let alone being India, Indira is not even a yojana.

Meanwhile, in London, history is not just turning, but doing cartwheels. And here it’s over the original Gandhi. A non-cooperation movement in the media has snowballed after two Conservative Party leaders unveiled plans for a Gandhi ‘peace statue’ in front of the Houses of Parliament. The Independent remarked on the irony of this announcement a day after Britain signed a 250 million GBP arms deal with India. Naysayers demand to know why public subscriptions are sought for a second statue when the Mahatma sits in granite contemplation in the leafy heart of Tavistock Square, barely a couple of miles away.

The most vociferous opposition has come from the doughty, 82-year-old historian and founder of the Indo-British Heritage Trust. Dr Kusoom Vadgama has dredged up Gandhiji’s dodgy bedroom experiments and ranks them with all the recent horrendous sexual violence against women in India.

Whoa, the aandhi blows away all Gandhis.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metropolis on Saturday. It now appears on the Edit Page of the Times of India, every Thursday. It takes a sly dig at whatever has inflated political/celebrity egos, and got public knickers in a twist that week. It makes you chuckle, think and marvel at the elasticity of the English language. Bachi Karkaria also writes Giving Gyan in the Mumbai Mirror, and its fellow publications in other cities. It is a shooting-from-the-lip advice column to the lovelorn and otherwise torn, telling them to stop cribbing and start living -- all in her her branded pithy, witty style.

Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metr. . .